Josephine Baker

Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Speaker 2 With markets changing and living costs rising, finding a reliable place to grow your money matters now more than ever. In the Wealthfront Cash account, your uninvested cash can earn up to 3.9% APY.

Speaker 2 That's a 0.65% boost over an already high rate for three months just for being a new client.

Speaker 2 There are no monthly account fees or minimums, and you get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts 24-7. So you always have access to your money when you need it.

Speaker 2 And when you're ready to invest, you can transfer your cash to one of Wealthfront's expert built portfolios in just minutes.

Speaker 2 More than 1 million people already use Wealthfront to save and build wealth with confidence. Get started today at Wealthfront.com.
3.25% base APY via program banks as of December 19th, 2025.

Speaker 2 It is representative variable, requires no minimum, and is earned on funds wept to program banks. Instant withdrawal subject to conditions boost up to $150,000.

Speaker 2 Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC, not a bank.

Speaker 2 Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal investment advisory services provided by Wealth Front Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor.

Speaker 3 Do you know what year it is? It's the year of the habit, and you're in luck. Rituals New Year sale is happening now.
Support your health goals with supplements for skin, gut, and more.

Speaker 3 Rituals got your back with 40% off your first month, plus a free gift with purchase at ritual.com/slash podcast. That's ritual.com/slash podcast.

Speaker 3 These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Dead Funny History. I'm Greg Jenner.
I'm a historian, and I want to tell you about someone cool. Now, imagine one of the most phenomenal performers in the world.

Speaker 1 Now imagine the world's coolest spy.

Speaker 1 What if I told you they were both the same person?

Speaker 1 Yep, I am talking about Josephine Baker, celebrated by many as one of the world's first black superstars. Josephine was born in 1906 as Frida Josephine McDonald in St.
Louis, Missouri in the USA.

Speaker 1 But she grew up in East St. Louis in Illinois.
Her mother nicknamed her Tumpy because she thought she looked a bit like Humpty Dumpty.

Speaker 1 What are you going to call her? Tumpy, because she looks like an egg.

Speaker 1 I think you need more sleep. Josephine's family were poor, so when she was eight, she had to work as a maid for a horrible man who made her sleep in a box.

Speaker 1 There were also very scary race riots against black people where she lived, so Josephine left Illinois aged 11 with dreams of becoming a star.

Speaker 1 She got work with traveling shows, one time by hiding in the luggage. Time to unpack.
Toothpaste, spare pants,

Speaker 1 child.

Speaker 1 I am.

Speaker 1 When she was just 15, Josephine moved to New York. She'd already been married twice.
Her second husband was Willie Baker. The marriage didn't last, but she did keep his last name.

Speaker 1 Josephine Baker now performed in shows like Shuffle Along and The Chocolate Dandies, and she found ways to stand out in the crowd.

Speaker 1 She pulled funny faces and crossed her eyes and deliberately tripped over when other dancers were kicking, a bit like when a footbuller goes on strictly. Keep dancing!

Speaker 1 And yet, Josephine was really popular, a bit like when a footballer goes on strictly. As one spectator put it, Josephine stood out like an exclamation mark.

Speaker 1 Just as things were going great for Josephine, amid the shining lights of Broadway, she

Speaker 1 left.

Speaker 1 For Paris. Now Paris was home to an exciting kind of new musical entertainment called Cabaret where performers had a lot more creative freedom

Speaker 1 and a lot fewer clothes.

Speaker 1 People in Paris had seen nothing like Josephine before and they loved her. She squished together loads of different kinds of dance from Broadway

Speaker 1 to tap

Speaker 1 bits of ballet.

Speaker 1 She was even inspired by kangaroos she'd seen hopping around in St. Louis Zoo.

Speaker 1 The Parisian spectators loved her, even if they didn't express that in the nicest of ways. Josephine, zero views are in.

Speaker 1 What do they say? It walks with bent knees.

Speaker 1 Did they call me it?

Speaker 1 It appears to be a moving saxophone. What does that even mean? She goes off on all fours, like a very young giraffe.
Is that

Speaker 1 yeah?

Speaker 1 Five stars! Hooray!

Speaker 1 And Josephine was loving it too. She said, I would love to die breathless, exhausted at the end of a dance.
Josephine used dancing to fight back against racist ideas.

Speaker 1 Her most well-known dance was the dance sauvage, or savage dance, which made fun of people who thought that black people weren't civilized or even like animals.

Speaker 1 By performing this dance in a really over-the-top and very silly way, Josephine Baker made the audience see just how silly racist ideas about black people were.

Speaker 1 She famously danced wearing a skirt made of fake bananas, which is now an iconic symbol of her resistance, and Beyoncé even wore one in her honor.

Speaker 1 Josephine Baker was now the toast of Paris and became one of the most highly paid performers in the world,

Speaker 1 as well as the first first African-American woman to star in a movie. And action.
There were even Josephine Baker dolls, long before Barbie.

Speaker 2 Hi, Barbie.

Speaker 1 Hi, Josephine. What are you doing today? Being glamorous and revolutionary.
You? Sitting on a tower of Lego while my human fell tips my hair blue.

Speaker 1 The cash was rolling in, so Josephine bought a luxury hotel suite and filled it with exotic pets. She had a snake called Kiki,

Speaker 1 a chimp in a hat called Ethel,

Speaker 1 a horse called Tomato. Tomato!

Speaker 1 Yeah, tomato. I suppose because when she took him for a run she could never catch up.

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 1 There were also monkeys, parakeets, a tortoise, oh, and Albert, named after the matrony of the hotel she stayed in.

Speaker 1 A pig?

Speaker 1 I forget to put sea chocolate on your pillow one time.

Speaker 1 Her most famous pet, though, was Chiquita, the cheetah, who wore a diamond-studded collar. Josephine even took Chiquita to the cinema.
I wonder what Chiquita made of the movies.

Speaker 1 Despite some great performances,

Speaker 1 my review of Wicked is

Speaker 1 too much singing and not enough great big slabs of meat.

Speaker 1 Three stars. Next, a tick-tock of a zebra with a hurty leg.

Speaker 1 Now all this is cinema.

Speaker 1 Josephine Baker also sang and opened her own club called Chez Josephine. It was stuffed with VIPs, including her beloved pets.
Mon dieu! That's Pig again! He stinks! Hey, we fixed his stink!

Speaker 1 You you gave him a bath? No, I just doused him in perfume.

Speaker 1 Yep, she really did perfume her pig. Josephine also got married a third time in 1937 to Jean-Lyon.
But then...

Speaker 1 World War II broke out and France was invaded by the Nazis. Josephine signed up for duty in the women's auxiliary of the French Air Force.

Speaker 1 Look out! The French Air Force is attacking! Huh!

Speaker 1 One of those planes is really flying like an saxophone. Now, she didn't fly planes, but Josephine became one of France's top spies.

Speaker 1 The name's Baker.

Speaker 1 Josephine Baker.

Speaker 1 How does one of the most flamboyant women in the world become an undercover spy? Okay, Baker. For this next mission, you'll need to infiltrate to the enemy camp.
Absolutely no one can detect you.

Speaker 1 Josephine, Buff!

Speaker 1 I wonder if James Bond is free.

Speaker 1 But because she was one of France's biggest stars, she thought nobody would search or suspect her, which I guess is fair enough. It would be like Taylor Swift working for MI5.

Speaker 1 It's me, spy, I'm the age and it's me. Josephine was also able to meet lots of important people at fancy parties and learn all of their secrets.

Speaker 1 She She would stash secret information under her clothes and write intel either on her own skin or on her sheet music.

Speaker 1 Very cool indeed, but not hugely helpful for the next singer using that sheet music.

Speaker 1 One, two, three, four, the Germans are deploying tanks to the south, send reinforcement.

Speaker 1 Song is a lot more about tanks than I remembered. Sometimes Josephine even used invisible ink.
After the war, France gave Josephine Baker special medals for her bravery, and she travelled the world.

Speaker 1 She even returned to America to perform. After all, she was an international superstar and a war hero, so they'd surely have to be nice to her now, right?

Speaker 1 Sadly, in the 1950s and 60s, the USA was still very racist, and still had something called segregation, which made it legal to discriminate against black people.

Speaker 1 In 1951, Josephine accused the owner of a famous nightclub of of racism because he refused to serve her. Surely everyone would have admired her taking such a courageous stand, right?

Speaker 1 A well-known journalist accused Josephine of being a communist, which was so serious that she was investigated by the American government. They monitored her closely for 10 years.

Speaker 1 One file even said, Let's watch who employs this troublemaker. In 1963, Josephine attended the famous March on Washington, all decked out in her French Air Force uniform and medals.

Speaker 1 This was the event where the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., made his iconic I Have a Dream speech.

Speaker 1 Josephine also made a passionate speech about her experiences as a black woman and entertainer. Now in her late 50s, she was really busy.
As a megastar, as an activist, and as a mother to 12 kids.

Speaker 1 12 kids?

Speaker 1 Yep, she adopted children from many different backgrounds to show how people could all get along together regardless of where they were from.

Speaker 1 Josephine raised them in a fancy chateau which had its own pool, restaurant, cheetah cage

Speaker 1 and a

Speaker 1 viewing gallery.

Speaker 1 Viewing gallery? Yeah, she invited members of the public to come and see her kids for a small fee. Bit weird.
How would you like it if your parents turned you into a tourist attraction?

Speaker 1 And over here you can see my teenage son in his natural habitat, in his pants playing Minecraft.

Speaker 1 To be fair to Josephine, she really wanted to show the world that it was possible for everyone to get along. Pretty soon though, she ran out of money.

Speaker 1 Diamond encrusted collars for cheaters don't come cheap. Josephine and her family were evicted from their chateau, which is the sort of problem that only happens in fairy tales.

Speaker 1 And what was she expecting anyway? Some beautiful princess to ride by and rescue her?

Speaker 1 Anyway, that's when a beautiful princess rode by and rescued her.

Speaker 1 Yeah, luckily, Josephine's friend, Grace Kelly, a movie star and literal princess of Monaco, put them up in one of her fancy French villas.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure they all would have fitted in the spare room, though. I'm sure we can find somewhere for you to stay.

Speaker 1 Thank you. It's just me and all my kids

Speaker 1 and my menagerie.

Speaker 1 I'll shift the sofa bed.

Speaker 1 Remember when Josephine had said earlier that she would love to die breathless, exhausted at the end of a dance? Well, I have some good news about Josephine's death.

Speaker 1 Yeah, on the 8th of April 1975, Baker starred in a show to celebrate her 50 years in show business. The guest list was more star-studded than Chiquita's collar, and the show was a huge hit.

Speaker 1 Josephine went back to her hotel room so happy she could die.

Speaker 1 So she did.

Speaker 1 But if you have to go, you might as well do it surrounded by rave reviews of your show. My fans say that I died of a full heart.
It was probably a cerebral hemorrhage, in fairness.

Speaker 1 Way to kill the mood, Greg. Sorry.
The French still adore Josephine, which makes sense. With their tiny pastries, they do love a good baker.

Speaker 1 I'm not sorry. But it is true.
In 2021, Josephine Baker was given a place at the Panthéon in Paris, where some of the most important people in French history are memorialized.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Pantheon of French Heroes. We've got them all.
Marie Curie, scientist. Voltaire, philosopher.
Don't lie!

Speaker 1 And give it up for the first black woman in the pantheon and first American, Josephine Baker!

Speaker 1 What a hero. So, how much do you remember from today's speedy history lesson? Let's find out.
Pencils are the ready.

Speaker 1 Question one, Josephine Baker's famous dancing skirt was made from which healthy snack.

Speaker 1 The answer, of course, was bananas.

Speaker 1 Question two, Josephine had loads of pets, but what was the name of her pet cheetah?

Speaker 1 The cheetah was of course Chiquita!

Speaker 1 And question three, as a spy during the war, how did Josephine Baker smuggle secrets about the enemy back to her colleagues in France?

Speaker 1 And the answer of course is with invisible ink, hiding notes in her clothes and sheet music and writing it on her skin. Well done.
Join us next time for another snappy history lesson.

Speaker 1 If you're a grown-up and you want to learn more about Josephine Baker, you can listen to our episode of You're Dead to Me with Dr. Michelle Cressfield.
Thank you for listening. Bye!

Speaker 1 This was a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4. Dead Funny History was written by Jack Bernhardt, Gabby Hutchinson Crouch and Dr.
Emma Nagoos.

Speaker 1 It was hosted by me, Greg Jenner, and performed by Malianne Reese and John Luke Roberts. The script consultant was Dr.
Michelle Cressfield.

Speaker 4 You're entitled to your money back when flight and hotel prices drop. Axel makes sure you always get paid.

Speaker 1 And it all happens automatically.

Speaker 4 Axel finds price drops and works with airlines and hotels to get your money back. Most members save more than $300 a year.
Membership is just $35 a year, and you're guaranteed to save more than that.

Speaker 4 If you don't, you get a full refund. Axel makes sure you never miss an opportunity to save on travel.
Visit helloaxel.com/slash pod to start saving today.

Speaker 2 Hear that? That's my alarm clock. How did I get here? Invested early, retired early.
Now, my morning meeting is with the Shore. Get where you're going with DIA, the only ETF that tracks the Dow.

Speaker 2 Getting there starts here with State Street Investment Management.

Speaker 5 Before investing, consider the funds' investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Visit state street.com/slash IM for a perspective containing this and other information.
Read it carefully.

Speaker 5 DIA is subject to risks similar to those of stocks. All ETFs are subject to risk, including possible loss of principal.
Alps Distributors Inc. Distributor.